Beginning
in San Juan del Norte on the Atlantic Coast, the 375-mile journey across
Nicaragua followed the San Juan River to Lake Nicaragua, through the famed
colonial city of Granada, and then onward via land until reaching the terminus
at the Pacific port of El Realejo. The trip took roughly 20 days, until Cornelius
Vanderbilt’s Accessory Transit Company opened an improved (shorter and
smoother) route half as long in 1851, which allowed aspiring gold diggers to
cross the isthmus in just two days, making total travel time between New York
and San Francisco 22 days. Until its closure in 1856 due to warfare, the route
was heavily traveled: nearly 2,000 travelers—or Californios as Nicaraguans called the
transient North Americans—per month passed through, which was a lot considering
that the population of Nicaragua at the time was only 250,000.
Perhaps the most famous traverser of Nicaragua was Samuel
Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name, Mark Twain. In December
1866, Twain was en route from San Francisco to New York City, where he
would set sail for Europe and the Middle East, a trip that inspired his first
best seller, The Innocents
Abroad (1869). He documented
this journey, including his passage through Nicaragua, in a series of letters to a San Francisco newspaper, Alta California, that were posthumously published in 1940 as “Travels with Mr. Brown.” (See
this article in the NYTimes.)
Around the same time
that Vanderbilt was facilitating the transit of men across the country of
Nicaragua, the U.S. was contemplating the construction of an interoceanic canal along roughly the same route—not
a novel idea, but rather one traceable back to the time of the Spanish
conquest, upon the realization that there was no natural passageway through the
isthmus. Explorers struggled to surrender to the fact that nature had not
placed a strait:
From the year (1513) when Balboa first looked upon the
wide sweep of the Pacific, a
century was occupied in fruitless efforts of gallant and capable men to
discover that strait which nature should have placed there—but did not…It ought
to be true, they said. The seas are so close together for a thousand miles.
Commerce between "Cadiz and Cathay " so greatly needs it. It must be
so (Taylor 1886: 98-9; emphasis my own).
But, Taylor continues,
“The world moving, like all large bodies, slowly toward conviction, did become
at last convinced that nature had not pierced the barrier for our use and
comfort, and this conviction once forced upon it, plans for an artificial
channel began…” (100).
The proposal for a Nicaraguan Canal dates back earlier than the notion of building one in Panama, and even after Panama was under consideration, Nicaragua was for many decades the preferred site. Nicaraguan nationalists, politicians, and citizens promoted the prospect of a transoceanic canal as a project that would single-handedly modernize and stabilize the country’s future. While citizens discussed the canal in town hall meetings, there were public celebrations of canal resolutions, treaties, and visiting survey expeditions. A newspaper called “Canal de Nicaragua” emerged, whose sole purpose was to promote the canal project. Even Nicaragua’s exhibitions at World Fairs, most notably the famous Paris Universal Exposition of 1889, projected a “canal-centered image of a cosmopolitan nation” (Gobat 46). The U.S.-chartered Maritime Canal Company began construction in 1889, but when the U.S. financial crisis of 1893 dealt a blow to preexisting economic difficulty, the company went bankrupt and halted construction.
In 1902, the U.S. Congress voted
to build the canal through Panama. Explanations as to why vary, but the aggressive
Panama Lobby was a major influence; one day prior to the vote, proponents of
the Panama Canal distributed a
recently issued postage stamp from Nicaragua showing an eruption of Momotombo,
one of the country’s many volcanoes, thereby
highlighting seismic instability and the likelihood of natural disaster.
Panama, which has no volcanoes and is not as subject to earthquakes, was
redeemed as the topographically and geologically safe option. Additionally, new
scientific research emerged that countered longstanding assumptions that
Nicaragua was the technologically superior route (Gobat 68).
Elite Nicaraguans—their dream of a
singular path to cosmopolitanism and modernization shattered—were particularly
devastated by the U.S.’s decision to build the canal in Panama. Nevertheless, in 1904, the
commencement of construction of the 51-mile (82-kilometer) Panama Canal put the
notion of a Nicaraguan canal to rest for the next century. The deal was sealed
with the inauguration of the Panama Canal in 1914. [1]
In recent years, serious proposals
for a canal in Nicaragua have resurfaced. President Daniel Ortega is
particularly enthusiastic about the idea, and Congress recently approved his
proposal for a new $30 billion canal (a value about four times
more than Nicaragua’s GDP) linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans [2]. Under the
recently approved proposal, the project would be carried out by a joint venture
in which the government would own 51 percent of shares and tenders would be
issued for the remainder.
Despite the Ortega
administration's claims, including its provocative statement that the Nicaraguan canal would be "larger and
deeper" than Panama’s, the prospect is not being taken
seriously enough to generate much attention from neighboring countries, or the
media. Representatives from the Costa Rican government, who have described
the project as “Pharonic,” are, however, concerned that the proposed canal
plan involves a piece of land that is on disputed territory. In 2012, Nicaragua
began dredging the San Juan, and Costa Rica accused them of invading
a small Costa Rican island on the river. Costa Rica’s foreign ministry has
stated that Nicaragua is free to develop infrastructure projects on its own
territory, but must adhere to relevant border treaties. Ortega maintains that
the land belongs to Nicaragua, and therefore has the right to build in the
waterway. The territorial dispute is currently being reviewed at the
International Court of Justice in The Hague.
With global trade increasingly shifting towards the Asia-Pacific region, China and other Asian countries are keen to build a second interoceanic path, but if and when this will materialize remains unclear, if not unlikely. The Nicaraguan Canal is, of
course, being promoted (once again) as the key to economic transformation of
the country, and has many supporters, including older people I’ve talked to who have grown up with talk of a canal but never a concrete
proposal. Here in the countryside, while I’ve found certain enthusiasts for the idea that
their beloved Ortega will make the old dream of a canal a reality, most people
agree that such a project will never transpire. Gold diggers and capitalists for now must stick to the Panama Canal.
References:
Gobat, Michael. 2005. Confronting the
American Dream: Nicaragua Under U.S. Imperial Rule. Durham: Duke University
Press.
Taylor, H.C. 1886. “The
Nicaragua Canal.” Journal of the American Geographical Society of New York 18:
95-126.
[1]
Panama boasts the only existing man-made
passage between the oceans; the Panama Canal handles 5% of world trade
annually, and is currently undergoing a $5.25 billion expansion project, set to
finish in 2014. The United States handed over control
of the canal to Panama in 1999, and since then the canal has generated a total
of $6.6 billion for Panama.
[2] $30 billion is the estimated cost of
actual construction. The feasibility
studies alone are expected to cost $350 million.
Note:
There is also discussion of the Chinese building an alternative to the Panama Canal in the form of a“dry canal,” or railroad, through Colombia. Colombia is the world’s fifth biggest producer of coal, which is in
high demand in China. Colombia’s Caribbean coast contains easily-worked surface
mines to high-quality coal, and a Chinese-sponsored canal connecting the coasts
would serve foremost as a coal delivery line, from Colombian mines in the
Atlantic, to Pacific ports headed for China.
